There are lots of changes in our household as a result of my husband's diagnosis, added to those that we are still trying to adjust to as a result of my still-new career. My identity shifts so much that I am having a devil of a time balancing and staying on my feet. With the new "normal" comes some decisions that cause me to wonder if the way I am actually living is consistent with my character (or what I thought was my character).
My husband, as a political enthusiast who is on rest, has had the television tuned into coverage of the Republican election hoopla close to 24/7. There is a lot of talk about flip-flopping and moral character and adherence to party values and such. The candidates love to point out inconsistencies between one another's actions and words. This has fed into my examination of my own tarnished record, so to speak.
It's a question I have wrestled with a lot as I travel through adulthood, because it is very difficult to live up to ideals. Making real life work often requires the moving of lines drawn in the sand. My favorite quote in all the world about parenting came from one of Jeff's former colleagues, delivered when we were talking about what we end up doing in the middle of the night to get our babies to go to sleep: "those lines we draw... it is after all, just sand." We feed them when we said we weren't going to, give them pacifiers we took away, bring them to bed against our pediatrician's advice, etc. We might have had really strong convictions about these things at 3pm. But at 3 am, the world looks like a very different place. Just as the world of parenting looked so much different from the non-kid side.
When I wrote the MLK day post, for instance, I wondered if people would think I believe I've made flawless choices in building bridges for those on "lonely islands of poverty." I have not. When my husband and I moved to Syracuse we made a decision to live out in a suburb. It just about killed me, the idea that I was deliberately choosing to contribute to what goes on in our urban deserts in order to benefit my own children. Real life presented me with a situation: I had a sensitive 6th grade girl about to start middle school in a brand new state, and I could put her in a safe school with good ratings and a good orchestra or I could put her in one where only 40% of the students graduate, extra-curricular activities are dismal, and not one person could assure me she would not be assaulted in the hallways every day.
Real life is a negotiation between what actually works and what we wish could work. There are many times parents say, "Before I was a parent, I said I was never going to _____. And now look at me." That is not just true for parenting. As a feminist, I have felt hypocritical about taking the luxury of staying home with my children in their pre-school years, and am trying to determine whether I am oppressing or providing a good job for a woman by considering getting someone to clean my house for me now that I have a career. And who do I think I am that I am considering not cleaning my own house anyway? It's not like I'm a lawyer or have 4 kids under age 5 or live in 4.000 sq. feet. The nutrition standards I would like to adhere to do not seem attainable at the moment. I see myself backing off of more and more church commitments, which nicely contributes to Christian guilt. I wonder if I'm being a bad wife by considering going to work tomorrow or a bad employee for considering calling off again.
How do we live with ourselves, when we make decisions that go against our beliefs? Are we hypocrites for erasing those lines in the sand and drawing new ones, or simply battle-tested soldiers trying to stay alive? A little of both, I would venture to guess.
The trick to the functionality of our bones is their ability to be both flexible and strong. If they were totally inflexible, they would shatter at our slightest movement. If they were rubbery, they could never support us enough to let us stand up. Their usefulness lies in the combination of both qualities. But what's the formula where perfect balance is achieved?
I think it's ok, as well, to run the results against a litmus test of sorts. Otherwise we can justify anything we decide to do. We may find some of our decisions still bother us, even if we would make the same ones again. Or maybe we can find ways to offset our carbon output, so to speak. We learn every time we hold ourselves accountable for our decisions. So I would love to hear from you. I find these conversations important, and would love to hear about how you have chosen your own personal shade of gray.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Standing on the Edge of a Nightmare
There is a term from nursing school that I adopted into my vocabulary because sometimes it is an incredibly accurate description.
Sense of Impending Doom.
While Jeff was in Kenya for 2 weeks, I would get this overwhelming feeling that I was truly single, all alone. He couldn't really call and we could barely communicate by e-mail, so perhaps that was contributing.
Then he came home, but for some reason I couldn't rest. Something was wrong with him. He would have what we thought was an asthma attack every time he exerted himself at all. He slept constantly. He was irritable. It was like he was here, but not really. I tried to tell myself it was jet lag; the long plane rides must have triggered his asthma. I tried to get him to go to the doctor. Today he finally went.
Tonight he is in a hospital room and the girls and I are alone again. I hope he comes home soon. I think everything is going to be ok, but maybe not. The doctors can't make promises. I know just enough from my nursing school days that half of medicine is guesswork. And I know exactly what pulmonary embolism means.
He has a large blood clot in each lung. The one in his left lung is so big that it has killed lung tissue. The doctors say that if something "catastrophic" was going to happen, it would have probably happened.
I have rehearsed this day in my nightmares several times. I know what comes next in the nightmare, so I hope I wake up soon, before that happens. I want him home safe. I want the doctors to tell me everything is going to be fine.
Do you know what I mean when I say that I feel as if I'm calling upon the emergency version of myself that I hoped I would never have to use? The one created in response to the lurking fears that pop up every now and then, the one invented "just in case" ever happens? The strong woman who can pick up the pieces of life and put them together in the event of a disaster ... I really never wanted to test drive her. I'm sure she's better in theory than practice. My friends are wonderful and supportive and I love them dearly and know that however strong Disaster Response Tiff happens to be that she is powerless without them.
I also know that Everyday Sustainable Tiff, whatever postmodern Christian feminist she fancies herself to be, is half of who she is without Jeff.
Sense of Impending Doom.
While Jeff was in Kenya for 2 weeks, I would get this overwhelming feeling that I was truly single, all alone. He couldn't really call and we could barely communicate by e-mail, so perhaps that was contributing.
Then he came home, but for some reason I couldn't rest. Something was wrong with him. He would have what we thought was an asthma attack every time he exerted himself at all. He slept constantly. He was irritable. It was like he was here, but not really. I tried to tell myself it was jet lag; the long plane rides must have triggered his asthma. I tried to get him to go to the doctor. Today he finally went.
Tonight he is in a hospital room and the girls and I are alone again. I hope he comes home soon. I think everything is going to be ok, but maybe not. The doctors can't make promises. I know just enough from my nursing school days that half of medicine is guesswork. And I know exactly what pulmonary embolism means.
He has a large blood clot in each lung. The one in his left lung is so big that it has killed lung tissue. The doctors say that if something "catastrophic" was going to happen, it would have probably happened.
I have rehearsed this day in my nightmares several times. I know what comes next in the nightmare, so I hope I wake up soon, before that happens. I want him home safe. I want the doctors to tell me everything is going to be fine.
Do you know what I mean when I say that I feel as if I'm calling upon the emergency version of myself that I hoped I would never have to use? The one created in response to the lurking fears that pop up every now and then, the one invented "just in case" ever happens? The strong woman who can pick up the pieces of life and put them together in the event of a disaster ... I really never wanted to test drive her. I'm sure she's better in theory than practice. My friends are wonderful and supportive and I love them dearly and know that however strong Disaster Response Tiff happens to be that she is powerless without them.
I also know that Everyday Sustainable Tiff, whatever postmodern Christian feminist she fancies herself to be, is half of who she is without Jeff.
Monday, January 16, 2012
No Bridges to Lonely Islands of Poverty
I admit that a 3 day weekend is a windfall, for whatever reason it comes. It makes my weekend actually relaxing instead of just the days I work really hard at home and church instead of at work. And I don't have to worry about what to do with my children and can just hang out with them, guilt-free.
That being said, I have been thinking about Dr. King's contributions to the world this weekend. Every day now, I find myself working against the segregation that still exists in society. My boss is holding a sort of mini-summit tomorrow about getting serious about eradicating poverty in Syracuse, and we are supposed to come to the table ready to discuss 4 questions
1. Why do we have people in poverty?
2. How do we eliminate poverty in our county?
3. What will it take to get people out of poverty?
4. What do we (our organizations represented at the table) need to do in 2012?
In preparation for that conversation, I found an article I remember Jeff telling me about. (Actually, Jeff had shared with me a conversation with the author after attending her talk, and I had to go find the article it was based on). It is entitled "Living in Each Other's Pockets: The Navigation of Social Distances by the Middle Class Families in Los Angeles" by Alesia Montgomery in 2006 in City and Community. The article reports that when parents (in this article, African American parents on the outer edge of the middle class) are trying to "do better" for their children, they spend a lot of time and money shuttling their children to safer parks and recreational areas and schools with higher test scores. A major difference between families in the "lower class" and the families in the "middle class" is that the activities of children in the middle class are highly orchestrated by their parents, with a lot of the legwork being done by mothers (can I get an Amen, somebody?!)
What ends up happening are 2 significant things. One is that the neighborhood being "left" declines even further. The second, and the one that I think is a sucker punch in the stomach to people in my line of work, is that when those families started attending the whiter, more resourced, higher test score schools,
the families at those schools starting moving further out or sending their kids to even nicer private schools.
The circle of advantage moves further and further out, leaving an even bigger donut hole in the middle.
At my agency, we run a workshop called "Bridges Out of Poverty." It is all about building a way for middle class people and those in poverty to have real conversations and relationships in order to change things for the most disadvantaged families. But, I have said this to my boss before: Does the middle class actually want to build bridges, or do they like protecting the gulf?
So I can cite many theories as to why there are people in poverty in our county. I can propose solutions like employment and real banks and grocery stores in depressed neighborhoods. I can even talk about making communities more viable and getting the middle class interested in the plight of the poor. But how do we actually do that? I know how we can plan to do that, but in the end, we work against what seems to be a universal human tendency to distance ourselves from those less advantaged from us. I say universal because this is as old as serfdom or older. It's as globally present as a caste system in India, severe social class separation in Brazil, and urban sprawl in the United States.
Dr. King's dream is realized in that there are not signs hanging on establishments saying, "For Whites Only" anymore, but I strongly feel that still for some, in Dr. King's words, "basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one."
That being said, I have been thinking about Dr. King's contributions to the world this weekend. Every day now, I find myself working against the segregation that still exists in society. My boss is holding a sort of mini-summit tomorrow about getting serious about eradicating poverty in Syracuse, and we are supposed to come to the table ready to discuss 4 questions
1. Why do we have people in poverty?
2. How do we eliminate poverty in our county?
3. What will it take to get people out of poverty?
4. What do we (our organizations represented at the table) need to do in 2012?
In preparation for that conversation, I found an article I remember Jeff telling me about. (Actually, Jeff had shared with me a conversation with the author after attending her talk, and I had to go find the article it was based on). It is entitled "Living in Each Other's Pockets: The Navigation of Social Distances by the Middle Class Families in Los Angeles" by Alesia Montgomery in 2006 in City and Community. The article reports that when parents (in this article, African American parents on the outer edge of the middle class) are trying to "do better" for their children, they spend a lot of time and money shuttling their children to safer parks and recreational areas and schools with higher test scores. A major difference between families in the "lower class" and the families in the "middle class" is that the activities of children in the middle class are highly orchestrated by their parents, with a lot of the legwork being done by mothers (can I get an Amen, somebody?!)
What ends up happening are 2 significant things. One is that the neighborhood being "left" declines even further. The second, and the one that I think is a sucker punch in the stomach to people in my line of work, is that when those families started attending the whiter, more resourced, higher test score schools,
the families at those schools starting moving further out or sending their kids to even nicer private schools.
The circle of advantage moves further and further out, leaving an even bigger donut hole in the middle.
At my agency, we run a workshop called "Bridges Out of Poverty." It is all about building a way for middle class people and those in poverty to have real conversations and relationships in order to change things for the most disadvantaged families. But, I have said this to my boss before: Does the middle class actually want to build bridges, or do they like protecting the gulf?
So I can cite many theories as to why there are people in poverty in our county. I can propose solutions like employment and real banks and grocery stores in depressed neighborhoods. I can even talk about making communities more viable and getting the middle class interested in the plight of the poor. But how do we actually do that? I know how we can plan to do that, but in the end, we work against what seems to be a universal human tendency to distance ourselves from those less advantaged from us. I say universal because this is as old as serfdom or older. It's as globally present as a caste system in India, severe social class separation in Brazil, and urban sprawl in the United States.
Dr. King's dream is realized in that there are not signs hanging on establishments saying, "For Whites Only" anymore, but I strongly feel that still for some, in Dr. King's words, "basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one."
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
A New Year's Blessing
That I made up. Which will be obvious.
May you not feel you must adhere to the decorating, entertaining, and other standards found in magazines or on HGTV. Nor the standards set by your neighbors. Or that snotty woman in your book club.
May mountains of laundry not raise your anxiety level one fraction of an inch.
May Zillow lead you not into temptation to peek at the value of your house.
May you be oblivious to the high fashion demands that only look good on those with the dimensions of my thirteen year old nephew (5'9, 108 lbs).
May your best haircut and color last you well into 6 months without needing refreshing.
May blissful blindness obscure from you such things as blueberry muffin batter splattered all over your walls, floor, and dog.
May you have the shrewdness to determine whether your children have a genuine need or are simply attempting to manipulate you.
May you perfect the art of saying no to the PTA, Sunday School, or other requests for you to volunteer time you really don't have.
May all of your houseplants be healthy and hearty and not die.
May the deer not know your garden even exists.
May you order appetizers, drinks, and dessert with your meal sometimes, and not worry about it in any way.
May dust not accrue on the surfaces of your home.
May you get to go on more dates with your husband.
May you delight in down time spent with your children. May you take it.
May you muster a little courage to try something new.
May you love with abandon and be deeply rewarded for it.
May you discover that you are more at home with who you are than you ever have been.
May the sun shine on you this year more than it did last year. But kind of like filtered through 30spf sunblock. Yet still providing sufficient amounts of vitamin D.
May you know that I appreciate the connection we have through this little nook of cyberspace.
Happy New Year!
May you not feel you must adhere to the decorating, entertaining, and other standards found in magazines or on HGTV. Nor the standards set by your neighbors. Or that snotty woman in your book club.
May mountains of laundry not raise your anxiety level one fraction of an inch.
May Zillow lead you not into temptation to peek at the value of your house.
May you be oblivious to the high fashion demands that only look good on those with the dimensions of my thirteen year old nephew (5'9, 108 lbs).
May your best haircut and color last you well into 6 months without needing refreshing.
May blissful blindness obscure from you such things as blueberry muffin batter splattered all over your walls, floor, and dog.
May you have the shrewdness to determine whether your children have a genuine need or are simply attempting to manipulate you.
May you perfect the art of saying no to the PTA, Sunday School, or other requests for you to volunteer time you really don't have.
May all of your houseplants be healthy and hearty and not die.
May the deer not know your garden even exists.
May you order appetizers, drinks, and dessert with your meal sometimes, and not worry about it in any way.
May dust not accrue on the surfaces of your home.
May you get to go on more dates with your husband.
May you delight in down time spent with your children. May you take it.
May you muster a little courage to try something new.
May you love with abandon and be deeply rewarded for it.
May you discover that you are more at home with who you are than you ever have been.
May the sun shine on you this year more than it did last year. But kind of like filtered through 30spf sunblock. Yet still providing sufficient amounts of vitamin D.
May you know that I appreciate the connection we have through this little nook of cyberspace.
Happy New Year!
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